The present disclosure describes systems and techniques relating to assigning internetwork addresses to devices that connect with an internetwork.
A computer network is a group of computing devices that connect with each other through a communications medium. Various protocols and standards can be used by such devices to connect and communicate with each other over the medium, but in general, each such computing device needs at least one address that identifies the device on the network. For example, Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs) in which each device on a given network has a media access control (MAC) address for its network interface, and the MAC address is used to identify the device for communications on the physical network segment.
In addition, multiple networks can be connected together in an internetwork, such as the Internet. The networks that form an internetwork are controlled by different parties, use different networking protocols, and have overlapping address spaces. Thus, a device that connects to an internetwork through a network needs an internetwork address in addition to its network address. The definition and use of such internetwork addresses is governed by an appropriate protocol, such as the Internet Protocol (IP) (e.g., IPv4 or IPv6).